Now you can schedule your tests to be launched automatically

While everyone else was preparing for Christmas, my team and I were discussing possible themes for the WhatUsersDo 2016 Product Roadmap (and yes, it’s capitalised in my head too). We decided to focus the first part of the new year on making it easier for our clients to run user experience tests with us.

One of the first new things we tackled was to find a way to enable our clients to launch their user tests at a date and time that suited them.

When? Later. Why? Because you can.

Imagine it’s the last day before you go on holiday for two weeks. (Yay! You’re going somewhere sunny that serves cocktails.) If you’re anything like me, that final day is usually a nightmare of working late to get things out the door. (Boo.)

Now it’s already 8pm. You’ve been trying all week to get this UX test done for your new workflow (or idea, feature, etc.). The problem is it’s still a bit flaky. Your development team has faithfully promised it will be stable by next Tuesday and you trust them, so you know they’ll deliver if they say they will.

Here’s your dilemma: you can’t risk kicking off the test now on something that may still be broken, but you don’t want to lose two weeks by waiting until you get back from holiday. Decisions, decisions.

So you decide to schedule the test to launch on the Wednesday you’re away.

You have faith in your developers to work their magic so you’ll have the user test results waiting for you when you get back. And if the worst does happen, someone in your team can cancel or push back the scheduled launch date for you.

You could even get your developers to watch the videos as they come in and do some minor iterations whilst you’re away.

Two weeks (and several cocktails) later: your team invites you to a meeting to discuss what they saw in the videos. There are a few things they wanted to run by you before making any changes, but importantly, they have tackled some really obvious things already – seemed crazy not to – and didn’t have to wait for you to get back.

Most important of all, they got direct and unfiltered feedback from real people – sometimes someone else saying it makes it easier to hear.

And all this means a productive and positive start to your first week back – if only things were always like this!